I'm glad that, like Muni, my psychiatrist now accepts my TransLink card. Things are getting depressing. And if you're still basking in a fading glow of whatever hope that holds you together, I don't mean to bring you down. But I do need to warn my friends and notify my acquaintances about the inevitable.

In a matter of months, your currency will be worth nothing. You'll go to the corner store to buy a newspaper and an energy drink and the guy behind the counter will tell you: "I'm sorry. This note is from the Federal Reserve. It is no good here." And he will go on: "If you want to buy this newspaper and this energy drink, you will have to give me your first born child." And, out of love of your children and a yearning to read the box score, you will cry. But he will take pity upon you. "Or, perhaps, I could let you compensate me in gold," he will say.

Of course, there will still be love and friendship, kitty cats and puppy dogs. There will be seventy degree November days. But, if you have any social conscience at all, you'll stay inside when the sunshine takes hold. On every beautiful day, the city bears witness to catastrophic climate change. By going for a walk or buying a cup of frozen yogurt, we earn the scorn of future generations. They will dishonor our graves and condemn us in textbooks. We have only two hopes: either we change the world dramatically, or we hope that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren have no inhabitable planet from which to judge us from.

Also, of course, the remaining stint of our own worldly existence won't be pretty either. Now is a good time to prepare for disaster. Prepare to collect storm water for personal consumption. Create a vegetable garden in your bomb shelter. Get ready to conduct all of your interstate travel on foot. Prepare to work harder for less. Find a good book for the bread line. Learn to enjoy the company of locusts. Prepare for tomorrow. I'm telling you, it will arrive prematurely on the day after today.

The 15 things President Obama should accomplish in his first week in office (in order of urgency):

1. Confiscate guns from individuals and fringe groups in rural America.

2. Re-distribute all wealth and property that is privately held.

3. Publish Karl Marx pop-up books for kindergarten classrooms.

4. Insure that no middle school student goes without a homosexual experience before attending high school.

5. Insure that our fourth graders can memorize the Koran as quickly as fourth graders in Taliban madrasas.

6. Establish a plastic bag windfall profits tax, allowing individuals to purchase tote bags from their favorite bookstores and public television stations with government assistance.

7. Bail out Volvo and Volkswagen, and all bumper sticker-related industries.

8. Build a pedestrian bridge from Cambridge to Berkeley that will successfully bypass real America.

9. Turn Guantanamo Bay into an amusement park for boys raised by lesbian couples.

10. Let Mahmoud Ahmadinejad go down on Hillary Clinton without preconditions.

11. Televise this on Al Jazeera.

12. Free Ted Stevens and all political prisoners.

13. Begin all press conferences with the phrase: "Listen, motherfuckers..."

14. Surrender the country's liberty to the United Nations and to every Zionist cabal that sounds interesting.

15. Prepare for re-election.